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Egg Cream
2 egg yolks 2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons water 1/2 lemon (grated rind and juice) 2 egg whites, beaten Beat the egg yolks with the sugar till well blended; add the lemon juice, rind and water, and cook in a double boiler, stirring constantly until the mixture thickens. Cool, fold in whites of eggs. Serve in small cups.
This is a lemon sabayon-style invalid food, and the problem is structural rather than a matter of technique: half of the eggs never see heat at all.
- The raw whitesThe yolk mixture is cooked over water until it thickens, but the beaten whites are folded into the cooled custard and the dish is served as is. Nothing in the recipe brings those whites to a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, which can be present in the shell and the egg itself.
- The intended eaterDishes of this kind were made for convalescents, the elderly and the very thin. Those are precisely the people for whom an egg-borne infection is most likely to become serious, and raw-egg invalid cookery has largely fallen out of use for that reason.
- Cooling does not helpThe recipe cools the custard before the whites go in, and nothing after that point applies heat; the finished dish is simply spooned into cups. The sugar and lemon juice present here are nowhere near enough acid or osmotic pressure to control bacteria in the uncooked whites.
- No temperature givenThe original asks only that the yolk mixture be stirred "until the mixture thickens" in a double boiler. Visible thickening is not a reliable indicator of a pasteurising temperature or holding time, so even the cooked half of the dish has no dependable endpoint as written.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a lemon foam or sabayon written with measured temperatures, rather than adapting this one.
- Reading the original"Egg cream" here means a light egg foam, not the soda-fountain drink of the same name; there is no cream in it. No yield is stated beyond serving it in small cups.